“What’s the matter, Maurie?”

           Maurie says a week ago he slept with a poet who kept her sharpened pencil underneath the pillow. At breakfast she stuck it behind her ear. Today she sent him the poem.

           (He can’t mean me, I know. I’ve never slept with Maurie and keep my pencil in my pocket at all times.)

          “Isn’t that a shabby thing to do by a friend?” he asks.

           “But, Maurie, what’s a poor poet to do with her excitements? Take them back to bed? Paste them in her album? Eat them? When all she wants to do is to be writing!”

           “About the literary scene again!” says Maurie.

           I ask him if he recognized himself.

           “No,” he says. “The man in the poem must be three other lovers.”           

           “Did you recognize her?”

           “Only the left rib out of which she’d fashioned a whole new woman.”

           “Will you publish it in The Magazine?”

           “Yes,” he says. “It’s a good poem. But why won’t the girl invent?”

           “And don’t you think she would if she knew how? Pity her, Maurie. She’d prefer to write about sorcerers, ghosts, gods, heroes, but all she knows is you.”

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           In the middle of the night I wake and know Maurie meant me. I call him on the telephone and say, “I use you too, and I know that is indefensible in friendship and as art.”

           Maurie waits for me to say, “And I’ll never do it again,” but I’m silent a night and a day. For one month I cannot write a word. The following Monday I sit down, sharpen my pencil, and invent a story about Maurie and me having this conversation, which has taken root in the corner of my mind where it will henceforward sprout a small but perennial despair.

           I put the story in an envelope and send it to Maurie.